Improving Patient Care with Clinical Alerts
By Nick Briseno

Clinical Alerts is a tool that can help provide better patient care. However, it is a relatively new feature and many organizations have yet to realize its full benefits. Clinical Alerts is exactly what it seems: alerts of clinical information relevant to the patient. This clinical information should be shared with pertinent clinicians and care givers during a patient’s visit for tests and treatments.

syngo^® Workflow has a special way of treating alerts. Although still in its infancy stages, the concept is starting to be adapted into medical imaging workflows and processes. It is wise to arm end-users with utilities and system tools that provide as much patient information as possible. This is done primarily to aid in patients care and help facilitate treatment. Clinical Alerts is a tool that can assist clinicians in laborious tasks, such as having to click on yet another screen to find more critical patient information. It can be used to display critical information and alleviate strain on the clinician. Additionally, Clinical Alerts can be controlled to automatically display throughout syngo^® Workflow, either in patient tracking, or at all functions where patient information is accessed.

Alerts can be designed to display with many different flags. However, be advised, in the current version of the system there is a limit of how many can be used at one time. Some uses for alerts are: pregnancy flags, diabetic patient, metal implants, allergies, previous allergic reactions, etc. The uses are almost limitless.

Furthermore, alerts aren’t simply automatic displays. They may also trigger Interactive Documents. Interactive Documents would then prompt the end user for additional information, or to at least acknowledge the message that has been automatically displayed. These practices are becoming more frequently utilized in the medical imaging department as a standard for patient care, because it provides immediate awareness of what can or cannot be administered to the patient. For example, one common use for Clinical Alerts is to determine if the patient should have imaging contrast administered before they are imaged through Cat Scans, X-Rays, or any other type of imaging modality that would use contrast with potential reactive outcomes.

Alerts are initially created with an event entry in UEM in RUMBA. After the entry has been made available in RUMBA, the next stop is to create the UDT Maintenance entries under Profile Definitions, in RMSAPPL. However, it varies on the UDT setup V27 – V28 versus V30.0X versions. The typical V30 setup allows users to locate the Clinical Alert mnemonics at the Patient Order/Entry level, as well as at the Patient Tracking level. Other uses may be combined with Mammography and Scheduling mapping as well. However, UDT Maintenance also provides a region for a system wide-setup, which means the system-wide setup will allow the alert to trigger at any module used in the RIS.

Clinical Alerts is definitely a function to consider, as a value added plug-in. However, it’s important to define the workflow and patient care needs. There are areas where Clinical Alerts, although good reminders of patient information, isn’t always practical for medical imaging workflows. More importantly, providing the adequate training, and feature function adaptation procedures, will provide for successful outcomes. The use and success of Clinical Alerts, can be measured by end-user satisfaction overall.

For more information on Clinical Alerts please contact us at vcs@getvitalized.com or call us at 610.444.1233. For more information on the services and solutions that VCS provides, visit our website at www.getvitalized.com.